Can Crows Plan For The Future?

The intelligence required to think well ahead is not usually attributed to animals, but new research has shown that one species of crow can use tools to plan up to three moves ahead to secure a meal, a bit like the game of chess a human plays, says Alex Taylor. Researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, planning ahead is actually more difficult than it seems. To do this, you have to define a possible future in your mind, and then take concrete steps to make that scenario a reality. Even humans are notorious for lack of planning.

The birds, known as New Caledonian crows, are famous for making tools and turning branches into spears and hooks that they use to eat caterpillars. New Caledonian crows are a member of the corvidae family, and are related to the ravens, American crows, and magpies. They live in a group of islands east of Australia. New Caledonian crows are intelligent in ways Numerous, they are able to drop rocks for example into a bowl filled with water to displace the fluid and float a little food.

The degree to which they can mentally plan their actions in advance is unclear because such things are very difficult to show definitively, Taylor explains. It’s hard to know how animals think, and it’s easy to infer what’s going on, he says, but it takes careful testing to show. Unfortunately, you can’t ask crows what’s on their mind.

Taylor and his colleagues created an experimental setup to do this, which consisted of a box-like object in which different parts of the puzzle were hidden from the others. In one chamber, for example, they placed a twig in another tube, and in another tube they placed a rock, which could not be released with a stick. In a third, a device dispensed a bit of flesh when a rock was dropped into it, and the fourth area contained a distracting and unnecessary device of either a twig or a rock.

The researchers familiarized wild-caught birds and trained them to solve discrete tasks independently, so for example they learned how to get food by dropping a rock into a room. Next, they released the birds on the four-part puzzle, and several crows performed the sequence. Correct events to free food without making any mistakes, and the fact that these tasks were hidden from each other indicates that the crows were picturing in their minds the necessary sequence to obtain food.

Choosing the right tool under a variety of scenarios for use elsewhere likely means that crows have a mental representation of that and what is needed there to solve a complex task, says John Marzloff, a researcher at the University of Washington and a crow expert who was not involved in the study. He participates in the newspaper.

The researchers also modified the tasks slightly to see if the crows were still able to plan and execute correctly when conditions changed, and found, perhaps not surprisingly, that the animals were more adept at using twigs than rocks, which makes sense given their behavior in the wild.

The study raises puzzling questions: Can other animals plan for the future and to what degree of complexity? What does this say about their intelligence and level of influence? For example, the study shows that these crows, which have brains very different from those of great apes, nevertheless possess many similar mental abilities, says Kaylee Swift, a researcher at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study.

Swift says:

Imagination is one of the pillars of the cognitive toolkit we use to measure intelligence, and this shows strong evidence of such abilities in birds, and studies conducted continually add that these animals have such high cognitive abilities, such as planning and mental travel, that we would have found them funny many years ago. Decades later, it really shows how wrong we are in using the term bird brain as an insult and demands our future dedication to these research questions